This page features my book reviews published montly in the Columbia Reader. I welcome your feedback. Please contact me if you would like to share your thoughts about one of the books.
WE THE ANIMALS
Justin Torres
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
$18.00
“We’re never gonna escape this,” Paps said. “Never.” --from We the Animals |
Tolstoy began Anna Karenina with his famous observation on families: that all happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. He might have added that it’s from the unhappy families that we get our best stories.
Imagine Catcher in the Rye as the tale of a well-adjusted, happy teen who gets good grades, admires his parents, and all adults for that matter, because they’re such great role models; or The Sound and the Fury as the story of a down-to-earth, tightly knit and loving family more resembling The Waltons; or Henry VIII, where the kind and faithful monarch enjoys a life of matrimonial bliss with his one beloved wife (You choose which one of the six.)
We the Animals provides glimpses of another unhappy family being unhappy in its own way. Though half white, half Puerto Rican, this family’s life is comprised of events and experiences that could be from anyone’s story.
If you were sitting alone for an hour, without distractions, and asked to remember your childhood, this is the kind of book you would probably come up with, evoking moments—some painful, some humorous, some tender, others transcendent—that together are like pictures at an exhibition entitled Your Life, which, like the Smithsonian’s, is too vast to experience on any one visit.
The narrator of We is recalling when he was seven years old. He and his two brothers are little hellions exploring and having adventures in their own world. The brief episodic chapters reflect a meandering mind recollecting events from his past, unconnected except by the ephemeral string of memory (The final chapter explains the circumstances of the narrator’s remembering.)
The book also testifies to the resilience of young children who haven’t learned that violence and abuse and going hungry aren’t the norm.
Appearing on a number of Best Books of 2011 lists, We the Animals packs a wallop for such a slight work (125 pages), with moments that can be both visceral and profound (“What happens when you die?” I asked. “Nothing happens,” he said. “Nothing happens forever.”)
Contrary to Tolstoy’s observation, We suggests that all families are happy and unhappy, each dysfunctional in its own way, and each discovering its strengths in its own way.
This review first appeared in The Columbia River Reader (December 15 - Januaryl 14, 2011/2012). Reprinted with permission.
THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES
Jussi Adler-Olsen
Dutton
$25.95
He’d thought it would make his life easier, having an assistant. The man would have plenty to do while Carl kept busy counting off the hours behind his closed eyelids. The floor had to be washed, coffee had to be made, and documents needed to be added to the case files, which then had to be put away There would be more than enough tasks to occupy him, he’d thought at first. But now, a little more than two hours later, the man was sitting there, staring at him with his big eyes, and everything was nice and neat and tidy… “Do you like solving Soduku puzzles … ?” he asked, handing Assad the magazine. from The Keeper of Lost Causes |
Jussi Adler-Olsen has been called “Denmark’s Stieg Larsson”—which you just know has to be irritating to Jussi Adler-Olsen.
Olsen is Denmark’s #1 crime writer and the author of a number of international bestsellers (I’m going off the book blurb here because how would I know?)
Full disclosure: Detective fiction is not my genre of choice. I think I am one of maybe five people in the northern hemisphere who were not absolutely enthralled with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Nagging questions of plausibility keep interrupting my involvement in these kinds of stories.
But I was drawn to The Keeper of Lost Causes by its title. Spending most of my life in social services, I suppose I identified with it.
Olsen’s detective is grumpy, grouchy, ill-humored Carl Mørck, recuperating from being shot in an incident that left one of his colleagues dead and the other paralyzed. We may wonder that his anti-social moods are the result of the trauma he suffered, but no, we learn Carl was like this before the shooting.
Mørck returns to duty and, due to his personality deficit, is given a do-nothing job in the basement by himself, responsible for closing dead cases, the “lost causes” of the title.
One of these cases is the mysterious disappearance five years ago of Merete Lyngaard, a member of parliament. Merete was bright, beautiful, vivacious and popular, so of course she had many enemies.
But she is not dead. She is being confined in some mysterious chamber (I am not giving anything away here. You learn this in the prologue—and in the blurb.)
Mørck is saved from being bland and boring through his assistant, Assad, an immigrant who has been assigned to clean up after him. Assad is lively, curious and hyper—everything Carl is not. Just as Larsson’s Girl trilogy was elevated above the norm by the fascinating character of its tattooed hacker Lisbeth Salander, what sets Keeper above the norm is Carl and Assad’s relationship.
While Keeper lacks the grisly murders and torture that so delighted Larsson’s readers, discovering where Merete is being held is good for at least a horrific shudder, maybe even a gasp.
As Lincoln diplomatically observed once when asked about a popular book of his day, people who enjoy this kind of book will probably like it.
And I highly recommend the title.
IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS
Erik Larson
Crown Publishing Group
$26.00
At the Katakombe cabaret, Werner Finck continued poking fun at the new regime, despite the risk of arrest. During one show a member of the audience called him a “lousy yid,” to which he responded, “I’m not Jewish. I only look intelligent.” The audience laughed with gusto. from In the Garden of Beasts |
You know you’re on the other side of history when Dachau is referred to as “a charming village.” Within a few years, it would become one of the most infamous concentration camps in a chapter of appalling infamy.
Seattle author Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City) has written an account of what it was like to live in Germany just as Hitler was coming to power. For us, looking from this side of history, it’s like watching a train accident about to happen.
Larson builds his story primarily around William Dodd, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, and his lively, rather dashing daughter, Martha, who had a series of affairs with, well, whoever seemed to be available at the time.
The ambassador is not an especially appealing or noble figure (his enemies in the State Department called him “Ambassador Dud”), though he gains respect in the readers’ eyes as he tries in vain to halt the violence and warn his government about Hitler’s threat.
In 1933, the Dodds shared many of the prejudices common to that time (Martha notes in her diary: “We don’t like Jews too much.”) They arrive with a view of Germany that is all edelweiss, alpine villages, and blond children in lederhosen, something out of The Sound of Music—and we know how that ended. They seem naïve now when viewed from the self-righteous perspective that history affords. It’s easy to call a game after it’s over.
In the space of a year, the Dodds’ romantic view of Germans and Germany had changed to one of growing alarm as they watched a civilized and cultured society slipping into barbarism.
Perhaps the true hero in the book is George Messersmith, America’s consul general for Germany, who continued to try and convince the ambassador and the U.S. State Department that “all this violence represented more than a passing spasm of atrocity. Something fundamental had changed in Germany.”
Messersmith became an irritant with his frequent and lengthy dispatches warning of what he saw emerging: “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.” Messersmith was eventually transferred.
If there is a lesson for our time here, perhaps it is to beware of demagogues, promising too much and playing to our fears and prejudices.
And as we approach an election year, they are everywhere.